SportTechie Covers S11 World Cup Fantasy

During a break from a tedious deposition a few years ago, Stoel Rives partner Teague Orgeman and his law colleague Thomas Braun started wondering why “there wasn’t a dominant—or even good, really—fantasy soccer platform out there,” Orgeman recalled.

Electronic Arts’ FIFA series and Sports Interactive’ Football Manager are among the most successful sports video and simulation games of all time. In Orgeman and Braun’s minds, however, no one had yet solved fantasy soccer.

Along with three other co-founders, they got to work developing what would become Starting 11, a daily fantasy game that launched last August ahead of the most recent English Premier League season, and which was updated last week to offer World Cup contests.

“While we were building it,” Orgeman said, “we asked what can we do that would be genuinely innovative, that takes advantage of technology that maybe didn’t exist three or four years ago?”

Starting 11—which offers cash and free games in the U.K., Canada, Germany and 33 U.S. states—includes two original features. The first is the ability to make live substitutions, like real soccer. While matches are ongoing, a fantasy manager can swap out up to three players on his or her team for others active at the same time.